Wednesday, February 18, 2015

Last week, the Australian Human Rights Commission delivered a damning report on the treatment of children in Australia's offshore gulags in Nauru and Papua New Guinea, alleging widespread human rights abuses. While they didn't use the word, the mental distress caused by indefinite detention makes it tantamount to torture.

An Australian Greens senator, Sarah Hanson-Young, says the Australian government is still sending children to the Nauru asylum seeker detention camp.

She says Australia sent children, some as young as four, to the camp on Friday and Saturday, just days after the release of a damning report on the abuses they face.

This is, as Hanson-Young says, outrageous, and it makes it clear that this torture is deliberate and planned. And again, if the Australian government won't stop it, then we should exercise our universal jurisdiction and start prosecuting them ourselves.